Zhang, Zimu. “A Frog’s Anthropocene Story: An Ecofeminist Reading of Delta Amphibiousness Through the Novel Chao Xi Tu.” Environmental Humanities 18, no. 2 (2026): 247–263. doi:10.1215/22011919-12383946
Lin Zhao’s 2022 Chinese novel Chao Xi Tu (Tidal Atlas) is renowned for its unique use of vernacular southern Chinese dialects, recounted by its nonhuman protagonist Wa, a giant female frog. Through the lens of an ecofeminist reading of the novel informed by delta anthropology and migrant ecologies, this article analyzes the multifaceted amphibiousness and multispecies worlding of the Pearl River Delta in southern China in the early nineteenth century. The novel constructs a more-than-human histography through bold speculation set at the height of Western colonialism—a period that swept southern China into the material flows and displacements of the imperial-capitalistic-Anthropocene. As one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing urban regions, the Pearl River Delta has been dominantly framed as China’s past “World Factory” and present “Greater Bay Area.” Such territorialized and developmentalist narratives, however, have overshadowed the delta’s liquid geography, hybrid cultural identities, and fluid cosmologies. This article argues that Lin’s novel provides a timely literary reworlding of the delta and its amphibious, more-than-human materialities, while mounting a powerful critique of Anthropocene violence, a force that continues to extract from and marginalize both the delta’s amphibious matter and its forms of knowledge. (Abstract)
© 2026 Zimu Zhang
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